Royal Asiatic Society Medal

The Royal Asiatic Society Medal was instigated in 2000 to replace the Society's Triennial Gold Medal and to be awarded in recognition of an outstanding contribution to scholarship in the field of Asian Studies. A new design for the Medal was sought and this was commissioned from Danuta Solowiej-Wedderburn. The medal took longstanding symbols of the Society and gave them a modern twist. She suggested:
'The starting point for the design of the medal was an article by John Hansman in the Society's Journal of 1984: ‘The Emblems, Medals and Medallists of The Royal Asiatic Society’. I was very inspired by the Daniells’ design of a caparisoned elephant for a signet, first produced in 1824, which was used to seal letters and documents. A simplified version of this design by Professor Perceval Yetts has become the ‘logo’ of the society, stamped on its letter head and on all its publications, and so it was a particularly appropriate image to use. I depicted the signet impressed into the brass as if it were wax, to act as a metaphor for the medal as a ‘seal of approval’. Unlike most Victorian award medals the lettering is incised, this is so that it will blend in with the name of the recipient, which obviously has to be engraved at a later date. In 1823 the Banyan tree was chosen for the society’s official seal by the Council and it has been depicted on previous medals commissioned by the society. It is a magnificent tree and an apt symbol of the society, growing strong and branching out. The medal was cast (rather than struck) which allows for more depth in modelling and I tried to take advantage of that by depicting the tree as a mature and vigorous plant, still growing strongly.' (Email, see details in the catalogue).
The medal was first awarded to John Gullick in 2001 with subsequent awards being made:
2003 – Professor Edmund Bosworth
2006 – Professor Christopher Shackle
2009 – Professor Sir Christopher Bayly
2014 – Dr Bridget Allchin and Professor David Bivar
2019 - Professors Carole and Robert Hillenbrand
2023 – Robert Irwin
The material covered by this catalogue consists of correspondence and administrative documents concerning the setting up of the award and the commissioning of the medal, and the individual awards. There are also photographs of some of the award events and a sample of the medal.

The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland was founded by the eminent Sanskrit scholar Sir Henry Thomas Colebrooke on the 15th March 1823. It received its Royal Charter from King George IV on the 11th August 1824 'for the investigation of subjects connected with and for the encouragement of science, literature and the arts in relation to Asia'. It continues as a forum for those who are interested in the languages, cultures and history of Asia to meet and exchange ideas.

Danuta Solowiej-Wedderburn is a Polish-born (1962) sculptor residing in the United Kingdom. She immigrated to the UK in 1987, where she began engraving plaquettes and medals. In 2006, Solowiej-Wedderburn was commissioned for an engraving for the reverse side of a British five pound coin commemorating the 80th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II. In 2010, she engraved the reverse of a five pound coin of Alderney that commemorated the life of John Lennon, one of The Beatles.

J.M. Gullick was born in Bristol in 1916. He attended Taunton School and won a scholarship to study Classics at Christ's College, Cambridge, from where he graduated with a Double First, and served as captain of college boats. After graduating, Gullick entered the Colonial Administrative Service and was sent to Entebbe as the Second World War was breaking out in 1939. After serving as aide-de-camp to Sir Philip Mitchell for a short period, he went to Teso District as third assistant district commissioner. In 1940, Gullick joined the King's African Rifles and participated in the Abyssinian Campaign. At the end of the campaign he held various roles in the military administrations in Cairo, Madagascar and Malaya, where he served for six months in the British Military Administration in the state of Negeri Sembilan.
When civilian government was restored in Malaya in 1946, Gullick was transferred to the Malayan Civil Service and served as state secretary for Negeri Sembilan. When the Federation of Malaya was formed in 1948, he joined the secretariat in Kuala Lumpur. He held various positions in the Defense and Internal Security Department, Rural and Industrial Development Authority and the Malayanisation Committee, on which he worked closely with Onn Jaafar and Tunku Abdul Rahman.
In 1956, Gullick returned to England and took up a position as company secretary with The Guthrie Group, a company with concerns in rubber plantations in Malaysia. He left Guthries in 1962 and embarked on a legal career as a solicitor He joined the firm of E.F. Turner & Sons in 1963 and by 1974 had risen to senior partner. After making partner, he left the firm to lecture on company law, publishing what became the standard work on the subject for students preparing for examinations, entitled Company Law.
J.M. Gullick, while in Malaysia, combined his official career with academic study of the history and culture of Malaysia. He was a prolific writer and continued to publish into his old age. In addition to the scholarly monographs, such as Indigenous Political Systems of Western Malaya (1958) and numerous specialist articles in journals, he also published introductions to Malaysian history intended for a general audience.

Bosworth was born in Sheffield. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in modern history from St John's College, Oxford,and both MA in Middle Eastern studies and PhD degrees from the University of Edinburgh. He held permanent posts at the University of St Andrews, the University of Manchester and the Center for the Humanities at Princeton University. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Exeter. Bosworth was a historian and Orientalist, specialising in Arabic and Iranian studies.

Christopher Shackle was educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College, before reading Persian and Turkish at Merton College, Oxford, graduating in 1963. He then went on to study Social Anthropology as a postgraduate at St Antony's College. He joined the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, in1966, becoming a Professor in 1985, Head of Department from 1983-1987 and Pro-Director of SOAS from1997-2003.
He is expert in the Saraiki language and has written several books on Saraiki literature.

Bayly was from Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, where he attended The Skinners School. He studied at Balliol College, Oxford and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree. He then remained at the University of Oxford and undertook post-graduate study at St Antony's College, Oxford, completing his Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree in 1970. Baylyl continued his academic career and was the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge from 1992 to 2013. He was also a trustee of the British Museum.
In 2007, he succeeded Sir John Baker as President of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. Bayly also became the Director of Cambridge's Centre of South Asian Studies. In the same year in the Queen's Birthday Honours, it was announced that he had been appointed a Knight Bachelor 'for services to History'. He was co-editor of The New Cambridge History of India and sat on the editorial board of various academic journals. He also served on the inaugural Social Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2009. He died in Hyde Park, Chicago, where he was in his second and last year as the Vivekananda Visiting Professor.

Bridget Allchin FSA (10 February 1927 – 27 June 2017) was an archaeologist who specialised in South Asian archaeology. She was born Bridget Gordon in Oxford but was raised on a farm in Galloway, Scotland. Bridget started a degree in History and Ancient History at University College London but, at the end of her first year, left for South Africa when her parents decided to emigrate. Interested in the culture of neighbouring Basutoland, Bridget persuaded her parents to let her leave the farm and recommence her studies. Enrolling at the University of Cape Town she read African Studies, which included anthropology, archaeology and African language. While there, she learnt to speak Sesotho and took up flying lessons.
Taught by Professor Isaac Shapira and Dr A. J. H. Goodwin, Bridget developed a specialism in the South African Stone Age but decided to return to England and in 1950 she began a PhD at the Institute of Archaeology studying under Professor Frederick Zeuner. Whilst studying, in 1950 Bridget met fellow PhD student Raymond Allchin and married in March 1951.  Travelling to India for the first time with Raymond in 1951, Bridget began to establish herself as a prominent South Asian Prehistorian in the UK and a pioneering female field-archaeologist in South Asia at a time when there were none. Her research interests and publications stretched across South Asia from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka. At first Bridget's academic and organisational skills were dedicated to supporting Raymond's fieldwork but, despite not holding a full-time academic post, she successfully raised funds and established a number of innovative field projects. This included directing fieldwork in the Great Thar Desert with Professor K. T. M. Hegde of the M.S. University of Baroda and Professor Andrew Goudie of the University of Oxford. Bridget subsequently developed links with the Pakistan Geological Survey and played a critical role in initiating collaborations which resulted in a survey of the Potwar Plateau directed by Professor Robin Dennell of the University of Sheffield and Professor Helen Rendell of the University of Sussex to search for Palaeolithic industries during the second phase of the British Archaeological Mission to Pakistan with the support of the Leverhulme Trust.
An independent author and researcher in her own right, she published The Stone-Tipped Arrow: a Study of Late Stone Age Cultures of the Tropical Regions of the Old World (1966) and The Prehistory and Palaeography of the Great Indian Desert (with Andrew Goudie and K. T. M. Hegde: 1978) and Living Traditions: Studies in the Ethnoarchaeology of South Asia (1994).
Away from the field, Bridget held the role of founding Editor of the Journal of South Asian Studies for over a decade and was Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (FSA) and a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. She was a founding trustee of the Ancient India and Iran Trust and was its Secretary and chairman, as well as founding member and Secretary General of the European Association of South Asian Archaeologists, editing a number of its proceedings. 
She died in Norwich on 27 June 2017 at the age of 90.

Adrian David Hugh Bivar, FRAS (1926 - 2015) was a British numismatist and archaeologist, who was Emeritus Professor of Iranian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He specialized in Sasanian seals and rock reliefs, Kushano-Sasanian coins and chronology, Mithraic iconography, Arsacid history and pre-Islamic folklore.

Carole Hillenbrand CBE FBA is a British Islamic scholar who is Emerita Professor in Islamic History at the University of Edinburgh and Professor of Islamic History at the University of St Andrews. She studied modern languages at Girton College, Cambridge (starting 1962), and Arabic and Turkish at Somerville College, Oxford, She earned her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 1979.
Hillenbrand specialises in classical Islamic history, especially the period of the Seljuqs and the Crusades and has produced major publications and articles within this field.

Robert Hillenbrand FBA is a British art historian who specialises in Persian and Islamic art. He is an Honorary Professorial Fellow of the universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge for 2008–09 and has held various visiting fellowships. He has also served on the Councils of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem , British Research in the Levant , and the British Institute of Persian Studies (Vice-President).
In 2018 during the conference of the Association of Iranian Studies at the University of California, Irvine, the Lifetime Achievement Award was awarded to Hillenbrand. In the same year he appeared in the documentary film Taq Kasra: Wonder of Architecture as a scholar of Sassanid Persia.

Robert Irwin was born in 1946. He read modern history at Oxford and taught medieval history at the University of St. Andrews. He has held teaching appointments in Arabic and Middle Eastern history at Oxford and Cambridge. He is a scholar of Arabic history and author of novels, translations and literary studies willing to provide an argument against prevailing orthodoxies.

The catalogue was arranged thus:
* RASM/1 - Inauguration and commissioning of the medal
* RASM/2 - John Michael Gullick
* RASM/3 - Clifford Edmund Bosworth
* RASM/4 - Christopher Shackle
* RASM/5 - Christopher Alan Bayly
* RASM/6 - Bridget Allchin and A.D.H. Bivar
* RASM/7 - Carole Hillenbrand and Robert Hillenbrand
* RASM/8 - Robert Irwin

Mostly open. Current material (the last twenty years) may be closed for confidentiality reasons. Please contact the archivist for further information Details can be found here : https://royalasiaticarchives.org/. The archive is open on Tuesdays and Fridays 10-5, and Thursdays 2-5. Access is to any researcher without appointment but it will help if an appointment is made via phone or email. Please bring photo ID.

As business records of the Society they have always been within the Society.

The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland was founded by the eminent Sanskrit scholar Sir Henry Thomas Colebrooke on the 15th March 1823. It received its Royal Charter from King George IV on the 11th August 1824 'for the investigation of subjects connected with and for the encouragement of science, literature and the arts in relation to Asia'. It continues as a forum for those who are interested in the languages, cultures and history of Asia to meet and exchange ideas.

Danuta Solowiej-Wedderburn is a Polish-born (1962) sculptor residing in the United Kingdom. She immigrated to the UK in 1987, where she began engraving plaquettes and medals. In 2006, Solowiej-Wedderburn was commissioned for an engraving for the reverse side of a British five pound coin commemorating the 80th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II. In 2010, she engraved the reverse of a five pound coin of Alderney that commemorated the life of John Lennon, one of The Beatles.

J.M. Gullick was born in Bristol in 1916. He attended Taunton School and won a scholarship to study Classics at Christ's College, Cambridge, from where he graduated with a Double First, and served as captain of college boats. After graduating, Gullick entered the Colonial Administrative Service and was sent to Entebbe as the Second World War was breaking out in 1939. After serving as aide-de-camp to Sir Philip Mitchell for a short period, he went to Teso District as third assistant district commissioner. In 1940, Gullick joined the King's African Rifles and participated in the Abyssinian Campaign. At the end of the campaign he held various roles in the military administrations in Cairo, Madagascar and Malaya, where he served for six months in the British Military Administration in the state of Negeri Sembilan.
When civilian government was restored in Malaya in 1946, Gullick was transferred to the Malayan Civil Service and served as state secretary for Negeri Sembilan. When the Federation of Malaya was formed in 1948, he joined the secretariat in Kuala Lumpur. He held various positions in the Defense and Internal Security Department, Rural and Industrial Development Authority and the Malayanisation Committee, on which he worked closely with Onn Jaafar and Tunku Abdul Rahman.
In 1956, Gullick returned to England and took up a position as company secretary with The Guthrie Group, a company with concerns in rubber plantations in Malaysia. He left Guthries in 1962 and embarked on a legal career as a solicitor He joined the firm of E.F. Turner & Sons in 1963 and by 1974 had risen to senior partner. After making partner, he left the firm to lecture on company law, publishing what became the standard work on the subject for students preparing for examinations, entitled Company Law.
J.M. Gullick, while in Malaysia, combined his official career with academic study of the history and culture of Malaysia. He was a prolific writer and continued to publish into his old age. In addition to the scholarly monographs, such as Indigenous Political Systems of Western Malaya (1958) and numerous specialist articles in journals, he also published introductions to Malaysian history intended for a general audience.

Bosworth was born in Sheffield. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in modern history from St John's College, Oxford,and both MA in Middle Eastern studies and PhD degrees from the University of Edinburgh. He held permanent posts at the University of St Andrews, the University of Manchester and the Center for the Humanities at Princeton University. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Exeter. Bosworth was a historian and Orientalist, specialising in Arabic and Iranian studies.

Christopher Shackle was educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College, before reading Persian and Turkish at Merton College, Oxford, graduating in 1963. He then went on to study Social Anthropology as a postgraduate at St Antony's College. He joined the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, in1966, becoming a Professor in 1985, Head of Department from 1983-1987 and Pro-Director of SOAS from1997-2003.
He is expert in the Saraiki language and has written several books on Saraiki literature.

Bayly was from Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, where he attended The Skinners School. He studied at Balliol College, Oxford and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree. He then remained at the University of Oxford and undertook post-graduate study at St Antony's College, Oxford, completing his Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree in 1970. Baylyl continued his academic career and was the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge from 1992 to 2013. He was also a trustee of the British Museum.
In 2007, he succeeded Sir John Baker as President of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. Bayly also became the Director of Cambridge's Centre of South Asian Studies. In the same year in the Queen's Birthday Honours, it was announced that he had been appointed a Knight Bachelor 'for services to History'. He was co-editor of The New Cambridge History of India and sat on the editorial board of various academic journals. He also served on the inaugural Social Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2009. He died in Hyde Park, Chicago, where he was in his second and last year as the Vivekananda Visiting Professor.

Bridget Allchin FSA (10 February 1927 – 27 June 2017) was an archaeologist who specialised in South Asian archaeology. She was born Bridget Gordon in Oxford but was raised on a farm in Galloway, Scotland. Bridget started a degree in History and Ancient History at University College London but, at the end of her first year, left for South Africa when her parents decided to emigrate. Interested in the culture of neighbouring Basutoland, Bridget persuaded her parents to let her leave the farm and recommence her studies. Enrolling at the University of Cape Town she read African Studies, which included anthropology, archaeology and African language. While there, she learnt to speak Sesotho and took up flying lessons.
Taught by Professor Isaac Shapira and Dr A. J. H. Goodwin, Bridget developed a specialism in the South African Stone Age but decided to return to England and in 1950 she began a PhD at the Institute of Archaeology studying under Professor Frederick Zeuner. Whilst studying, in 1950 Bridget met fellow PhD student Raymond Allchin and married in March 1951.  Travelling to India for the first time with Raymond in 1951, Bridget began to establish herself as a prominent South Asian Prehistorian in the UK and a pioneering female field-archaeologist in South Asia at a time when there were none. Her research interests and publications stretched across South Asia from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka. At first Bridget's academic and organisational skills were dedicated to supporting Raymond's fieldwork but, despite not holding a full-time academic post, she successfully raised funds and established a number of innovative field projects. This included directing fieldwork in the Great Thar Desert with Professor K. T. M. Hegde of the M.S. University of Baroda and Professor Andrew Goudie of the University of Oxford. Bridget subsequently developed links with the Pakistan Geological Survey and played a critical role in initiating collaborations which resulted in a survey of the Potwar Plateau directed by Professor Robin Dennell of the University of Sheffield and Professor Helen Rendell of the University of Sussex to search for Palaeolithic industries during the second phase of the British Archaeological Mission to Pakistan with the support of the Leverhulme Trust.
An independent author and researcher in her own right, she published The Stone-Tipped Arrow: a Study of Late Stone Age Cultures of the Tropical Regions of the Old World (1966) and The Prehistory and Palaeography of the Great Indian Desert (with Andrew Goudie and K. T. M. Hegde: 1978) and Living Traditions: Studies in the Ethnoarchaeology of South Asia (1994).
Away from the field, Bridget held the role of founding Editor of the Journal of South Asian Studies for over a decade and was Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (FSA) and a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. She was a founding trustee of the Ancient India and Iran Trust and was its Secretary and chairman, as well as founding member and Secretary General of the European Association of South Asian Archaeologists, editing a number of its proceedings. 
She died in Norwich on 27 June 2017 at the age of 90.

Adrian David Hugh Bivar, FRAS (1926 - 2015) was a British numismatist and archaeologist, who was Emeritus Professor of Iranian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He specialized in Sasanian seals and rock reliefs, Kushano-Sasanian coins and chronology, Mithraic iconography, Arsacid history and pre-Islamic folklore.

Carole Hillenbrand CBE FBA is a British Islamic scholar who is Emerita Professor in Islamic History at the University of Edinburgh and Professor of Islamic History at the University of St Andrews. She studied modern languages at Girton College, Cambridge (starting 1962), and Arabic and Turkish at Somerville College, Oxford, She earned her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 1979.
Hillenbrand specialises in classical Islamic history, especially the period of the Seljuqs and the Crusades and has produced major publications and articles within this field.

Robert Hillenbrand FBA is a British art historian who specialises in Persian and Islamic art. He is an Honorary Professorial Fellow of the universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge for 2008–09 and has held various visiting fellowships. He has also served on the Councils of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem , British Research in the Levant , and the British Institute of Persian Studies (Vice-President).
In 2018 during the conference of the Association of Iranian Studies at the University of California, Irvine, the Lifetime Achievement Award was awarded to Hillenbrand. In the same year he appeared in the documentary film Taq Kasra: Wonder of Architecture as a scholar of Sassanid Persia.

Robert Irwin was born in 1946. He read modern history at Oxford and taught medieval history at the University of St. Andrews. He has held teaching appointments in Arabic and Middle Eastern history at Oxford and Cambridge. He is a scholar of Arabic history and author of novels, translations and literary studies willing to provide an argument against prevailing orthodoxies.

This catalogue was created by Nancy Charley, RAS Archivist, in 2024.

Digital photography (without flash) for research purposes may be permitted for open records upon completion of a copyright declaration from, and with respect to current UK copyright law.

These records were produced during the course of the business of the Society.

The Council Minutes and Events and House Committee MInutes may also give information concerning decisions made.

Published

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